Abstract

The aim of Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom is to understand the philosophical foundations of Hegel’s social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the three central social institutions of the modern era—the nuclear family, civil society, and the constitutional state—are rational, or good. Its central question is: what, for Hegel, makes a rational social order rational? Since freedom is the fundamental concept of Hegel’s social theory, the book’s task is to understand the conceptions of freedom that Hegel’s theory rests on and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the book focuses on Hegel’s most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of “social freedom,” or the freedom of Sittlichkeit.